When I first heard about the Blob brush and saw it in action, my thought was why bother? …I'd rather have live calligraphic marks than expanded Blob brush.…I'm going to show you a couple of things that I like about it.…I use it a lot more creatively now than I did when I first found out about it,…which is often the case.…So if you see on the upper left-hand here this quadrant has live calligraphic brushes …and just below it is the same brushes in outline view, so you can see…they're just a vector path.…

And in the upper right quadrant of this little grid here, are the expanded views …You see sort of what a mess the Calligraphic brush turns into when you expand it.…And here's a similar set of marks that I created with the Blob brush. …Here is the blob brush in outline mode. You can see pretty clearly that it's not…only expanding the marks as you make them they look very much like a…calligraphic mark. In fact, the controls are very similar.…

But when you do things like scribble like this the marks actually not only…

Resume Transcript Auto-Scroll

Author

Released

2/15/2013

In this course, artist Sharon Steuer shows how to paint with the various natural media brushes inside Adobe Illustrator, one of the most overlooked sets of artistic tools in the entire Creative Cloud or Adobe Creative Suite. Along the way, she offers suggestions on how to customize these brushes to help express your creativity. Discover how to configure your workspace, adjust tool options, and set up a tablet. Then investigate the multiple styles of brushes in Illustrator—from Calligraphic, Bristle, and naturalistic Art brushes to Blob brushes and stroke profiles. Sharon also shows how to combine brushes and effects with other Illustrator features to maximize your control when drawing, painting, and adding expressive strokes in Illustrator.

Topics include:

Drawing and tracing with Wacom and Cintiq tablets

Maximizing control without a tablet

Demystifying Paintbrush tool preferences

Integrating brushes with other tools such as Smooth and Pencil

Adding brushes to objects and text

Creating naturalistic strokes with the Art brush tools

Picking up, storing, and applying brushes

Duplicating and customizing brushes

Creating transparent washes and watercolor with Calligraphic brushes

Drawing and erasing with the Blob Brush tool

Adding stroke profiles to lines and brushes

Organizing complex images with layers

Ideas for how to combine Illustrator brushes with Photoshop, and even with traditional media